I won the game back in June from here and have played enough for my review.

I've got to start by saying thanks again to Gouki.com for making me Jimmy of the Month back in June and hooking me up with another great game. This time around was even better. Not only did I get the copy of Final Fantasy Tactics A2 Grimoire of the Rift for this review, but I also have a copy of Dead or Alive 5 coming.

This review has taken me forever for a few reasons. The first is that I'm not that big of a fan of the Nintendo DS, so it's my son's system I played it on. If it was on a real system this would have been done a long time ago.

If you have ever played any of the Final Fantasy Tactics games you know that they are incredible. You can spend countless hours building a clan and doing all kinds of side quests. You have a few characters that have to join your team and and endless supply of others that you can recruit if you want.

The story is that you are a kid who ends up sucked into Ivalice through a magic book. Sounds pretty familiar. He crash lands in the middle of a battle so you are forced to join the clan to survive. You have to battle your way around to fill the magic book (grimoire) to find your way back home. You encounter some odd characters as you play and there is a ton of time put on they main story. And even after you finish it you can keep going. You actually have to if you want to collect all the unique characters, such as Vann and Penelo. And in the above picture you see the Seeq from Final Fantasy 12 I think and they are playable for the first time. The Gria are entirely new.

And if you have never played any of the Tactics games I should tell you it's a turn based RPG and you move across grids, think checkers. The stages you play in aren't exactly ground breaking but the are rendered pretty nicely. The music is also pretty standard and repetitive. There is no voice acting so be ready for a lot of reading, or skipping text if that's your thing. I've put in over 40 hours at this point and am still running around doing side quests so I'm not let down at all by the game.

It won't make spring 2011, now that that's over, Square claims end of July.

There's an interesting Facebook post by Shiina, the associate producer for the iPhone version of FFT. In it, he apologizes for not making the companies promised Spring release date. To make it up to us, he answers a few questions about the game and swears it will be released before July is over.

Quote:

Is the slow-down problem solved?
-Yes! It's definitely fatser, comfortable to play.
We'll show it in the trailer or a movie clip.

When will you release the iPad version?
-Now we plan to release it 1 month later than iPhone version.

Supported 3GS?
-Yes! Absolutely!

3G also supported?
-No. We tried to support 3G but it was toooo slow to play the game.

Does it have the Multiplayer mode?
-Nope. We had to cut it off for iOS devices.

Add-ons?
-No. We don't plan to release add-ons now.

Did you add the autosave function?
-Yes! Exactly!
If you get a phone call, the game will be automatically saved
and you can get back to the game immediately.
Honestly...it took much time to add this function. It made the dev team exhausted.

I'm still excited for this... I'd love to have FFT in my pocket whenever I need it. I hope it doesn't cost too much!